Pantry crumb cake

Sometimes there is no story. Sometimes it's Saturday and you just want to make a cake. So it was last weekend. I'd had this bookmarked for a while because I love any cake with sour cream in it, Melissa Clark is reliably good and this recipe is made for these times - infinitely adaptable to whatever you happen to have on hand. So I guess I do have a story after all. Especially as friends spontaneously dropped by - as we now have the privilege to do in Sydney in small numbers - and we all had cake together. It was sunny. It was Saturday. It was glorious.

Cardamom crumb cake

When is it acceptable to eat cake for breakfast? 
a) when it's your birthday
b) when in Rome (or more literally, for me, in Stanwell Park, where I frequently stay with friends who strongly believe that cake is a legitimate breakfast food)
c) when the cake in question contains cardamom, walnuts, coffee and orange zest, all of which can be found in pastries traditionally eaten in the morning
d) when you are planning to get up at 4am for the next month to watch the World Cup and need some extra incentive to exit your very warm bed

The answer for me, obviously, is all of the above. But with the World Cup approaching, I've been stashing treats in the freezer like a manic squirrel. Because you really do want something in your stomach to help you wake up when you set your alarm for the early hours - nothing too intensely sweet for first thing, just a little morsel to comfort you in the cold. This fits the brief nicely - cardamom, coffee, and sweet orange cake topped with a nubbly, buttery walnut crumb. It's good eaten warm, whether freshly baked (and studying the form guide) or reheated (straight from the freezer to the oven) for kick off.

Roasted pear cake with browned butter glaze

Because I read a lot of American food blogs, sometimes I get a bit out of sync with the seasons. Lately online it's been all about turkey and cider and staying in where it's warm, when here in Sydney it's time for tee shirts, swims (to cool off) and summer fruit. I had my first mango for the season this week and it was magic. But! I wasn't waiting til next year to try this cake, especially when pears are so readily available everywhere. Caramel in colour and flavour with its combination of sweet fruit and sticky brown sugar, this cake is undeniably autumnal. The oil/butter blend makes for an extraordinarily soft and smooth texture, with chunks of pear nestled into the crumb for contrast. Warm spices - cardamom and cinnamon - infuse everything and the brown butter glaze is the perfect nutty note to end it all on. If a cake can be cosy, this is it.

Coffee and cardamom pound cake

The weekend before last I flew down to Melbourne, which called for carry-on cake. I alighted on a recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi's new cookbook Sweet (stupendous - buy it in bulk and distribute to anyone on your Christmas list who loves baking), adapted it accordingly for airline travel (basically, just halving the quantities of ingredients so it could be made in a loaf tin) and before long I was slicing it in my friend George's South Melbourne kitchen. 

As students, George and I toiled together in a suburban Brisbane café serving Saturday shoppers coffee and cake, which probably explains why all these years later we particularly delight in staying in on the weekend with a pot of tea and a whole cake all to ourselves.

This is Ottolenghi and his co-author (Australian!) Helen Goh's riff on Rose Levy Beranbaum's revered recipe for "Perfect Pound cake". Light, moist and fragrant with coffee, cardamom and cocoa, it's just as good the next day, and the day after that. If indeed it lasts that long.

Carrot and cardamom cake

Curiously, I've become a convert to carrot cake. Not so curious perhaps, when I report that this recipe comes from a café I consider possibly the most perfect in all the world - that of the Rosendals Trägåd, a beautiful biodynamic orchard on an island in Stockholm. If you find yourself in that city, you really must go, though June rather than January would be advised. In Swedish summer, it recalls a scene from a Carl Larsson painting - nut-brown blondes of all ages grazing on cardamom-scented cakes in the dappled light of apple and pear trees. 

Made moist with oil and carrots, infused with Scandi staples cinnamon and cardamom, and lashed with creamy lemon icing, this is cake to convert anyone who believes (as was my firm opinion for most of my life) that vegetables have no place at all in baked goods. I have relaxed this stance once before, for the beloved Bourke St Bakery, whose carrot cake I've blogged already on this site. That recipe - though sublime - is somewhat fiddly. This one has the advantage of being made in one bowl, and once cooked, needs only to be cooled and icing slathered on top. Australian summers are a little harsher than Nordic ones, so keep it indoors unless you choose a mild day for a picnic. The icing is the issue and believe me, you don't want to skip that. One solution could be to keep it separately in an esky and pile it on just before serving. If it oozes a little, all the better.

Forgotten cookies

Some things are worth making just for the name alone. Or in this case if you're travelling north to work with a colleague who's gluten-free and you need something sweet to power both of you through two days of script meetings. I was tossing up between lime polenta cake (made in a bar tin) or little lemon polenta cakes (small, stackable) when I remembered forgotten cookies. This recipe, from Chicago chef Sarah Gruneberg infuses beaten egg whites with sugar, cardamom and vanilla and winds through sour cherries, dark chocolate and toasted pecans. The dough - such as it is without flour or even, miraculously, dairy - is dolloped into spoonfuls onto a baking tray, sprinkled with sea salt, baked for five minutes and left in the oven overnight. In the morning, you're rewarded with little boulders of meringue. Crisp on the outside, with a chewy, marshmallow-like interior containing crunch, combining sweet and sour... once tried, never forgotten.

Cardamom buns

The only research I did before arriving in Stockholm last month was not on its architecture, or archipelago, its museums or shopping districts. Or even Abba. It was about breakfast, and specifically: cardamom buns. I'd booked an air b n b based on its proximity to a bakery that made some of the best in town, I was reliably informed. However what my narrow band of research did not reveal is that most of Sweden is away during July. Many businesses too, close for the month, including my well-researched bakery. But fortunately Stockholm is liberally sprinkled with bakeries - not that you even need one. Even the convenience stores sell cardamom buns (and, by the looks of them, good ones!), such is their place in the culture. In walking distance of the apartment I stayed in were several excellent sources and I made the most of it. Luckily now I'm back home, it's not too hard to make my own, like most Swedes do (possibly only tourists like me buy them commercially).

Cardamom is a popular flavour in Scandinavian baking, and it's so beautiful here - speckled through these lightly sweet pastries. The crushed black seeds in the dough contrast with the pretty pearl sugar sprinkled on top. Unlike American-style cinnamon buns, these are modestly-sized, and not too heavy on the sugar. The spice is the dominant flavour and goes beautifully with coffee, for breakfast, for fika, for memories of Scandinavian summer.

Cardamom pear sour cream cake

I first discovered cardamon in sweets through Scandinavian baking. Over there, it's a dominant flavour in cinnamon buns, the reason their sort are so different to the American kind. Speckled through dough, or cake batter, it brilliantly balances out the sweetness around it, transforming what would otherwise often be plain and homely into something sophisticated. Here, it works its magic in a cake enriched with sour cream and crowned with petals of pear. It couldn't be less fussy to make or to take... I transported thick slices of this one to Sydney Swans match on Saturday night and down the south coast on Sunday for Mother's Day. I couldn't make it for my mum, but I could feed my friends, and she would have liked that.. and this cake. Very much.

Cardamom cake

For me, the perfect cake to have with coffee is a simple one and this might just be the best. Cardamom's flavour suggests a market in south Asia but the origins of this recipe are further north in Scandinavia, where the ritual of coffee and cake has a name (fika) and a place in the culture. This butter cake is simple and sweet, lightly tangy with lemon and fragrant with cardamom. Though you can absolutely use the spice ready ground (if you do, maybe use half the amount) the seeds, crushed lightly in a mortar and pestle, look beautiful flecked through the crumb of the cake. Its burnished gold exterior and brown sugar warmth make it extra lovely at this time of year, eaten in the (almost) winter sun.

Swedish cinnamon buns

Cinnamon smells like morning. I've been seeing quite a bit more morning lately, courtesy of my hectic football-watching schedule. And when you're getting out of bed while it's cold and dark outside, you need a little extra incentive. 

Cinnamon buns were something I'd always asssociated with America. Maybe because inevitably the first thing you encounter after getting through customs at the airport is a Cinnabon franchise selling enormous, puffed-up, heavily-frosted buns. I like a bit of excess from time to time but that much sugar too early in the morning threatens to put you back to sleep rather than wake you up. When I was in Copenhagen recently - a place with no shortage of delicious pastries - I was pointed in the direction of Café Rosa by the brilliant English-language blog A Guide to Copenhagen, which introduced me to so many of my favourite places when I was there. Linn, who writes the blog (as well as her own super-cute cooking one which you can check out here) is a Swede living in Denmark and claimed that the buns sold here were as good as any she'd had at home. I'd only had the American version to compare to, but really, after the first bite, there was no comparison. Speckled with cardamom, lightly sweet, with a ribbon of buttery cinnamon threaded through the interior, the Swedish cinnamon bun is pretty well perfect. Especially with a cup of strong black coffee as you watch the sun rise in Sydney, and set on screen in Rio.